You step off an air-conditioned shuttle and the desert answers with heat and color—the red sandstone seems to glow, as if the sun has found a way to set only one color here. The Valley of Fire doesn’t ease you in; it confronts you with fins, domes and ribbed rocks that lean and pry at the sky. On a six-hour tour from Las Vegas, the landscape becomes a film reel of dramatic slices: Rainbow Vista’s banded domes, the carved faces at Atlatl Rock, the honeycombed layers of the Beehives, and the improbable silhouette of Balancing Rock.